Off The Fence: A Bumper Biennale Special

Get in the gondola, we're looking at some buildings.

Dear Readers,

Welcome – or welcome back – to Off The Fence, the newsletter. Would you believe it, given that Issue 23 of the UK’s Only Magazine is still so fresh in everybody’s minds: the summer issue, #24, has just been sent to the designers. Print never sleeps! And increasingly, nor do we.

Stepping down from our cross for a moment, allow us to show you this fabulous snap of Issue 23, being enjoyed by a subscriber puffing joyfully from a pipe by the frigid, sharkless waters of Donegal. We would wager that there is no magazine better suited to pipe-smoking, or any other healthy pursuits you may partake in. Tap the button below and indulge yourself with a subscription.

Packwatch

Waving away the fug of tobacco smoke, we have this week’s newsletter, which brings you two dispatches from the Venice Architecture Biennale, courtesy of our dutiful design scribes, Phineas Harper and Sarah Simpkin – the former a veteran of biennali passim, and the latter a débutante. First up, a primer on what to expect this year.

La Biennale Architettura: A Beginner’s Guide

The plucky upstart to its more venerable art world cousin, the Venice Architecture Biennale is usually the most hotly anticipated event in the architectural calendar. A vast Prosecco-fueled industry knees-up masquerading as high culture in a setting infinitely more agreeable than the Excel Centre – what’s not to love?

But this year is different. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, former leader of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement’s youth wing, was appointed President of the Biennale by Giorgia Meloni in 2023. There has been a lot of anxiety to see what having an actual fascist at the helm will mean for the world’s oldest international cultural fair. Now we have an answer, as Buttafuoco’s first Biennale, curated by Italian architect Carlo Ratti, opened to the public last week.

Here’s what you need to know to survive a visit:

1. The curator is a tech bro. The first white man to lead the architecture biennale for over a decade, Ratti founded the MIT Senseable Cities Lab who use data and technology to speculate about the future of urban design. Buttafuoco evidently picked him because he’s architecture’s answer to Elon Musk. Strap in for drones, AI, unintelligible infographics, space suits, robotic arms, robotic dogs and robotic arms mounted on robotic dogs.

2. There are four types of spritz you can drink in Venice: Aperol Spritz is the worst. Campari Spritz is bitterer and better – Select Spritz even more so. Real ones choose Cynar, a dark brown aperitif made from artichoke. If anyone ever offers to make you a Cynar Negroni, marry them immediately.

3. The bit of the Biennale personally curated by Ratti is a cacophonous cybernetic fever dream in love with techo-accelerationism. 3D printing is back with various blobs and squiggles spurted from computer-controlled nozzles. During the press opening, a toddler breaks a ludicrously expensive humanoid robot by hammering a handpan. Kids: 1, Robots: 0.
   

4. Thomas Heatherwick has designed a satellite for growing lettuce in low orbit.

5. Not everything in Ratti’s exhibition involves semiconductors. Thai architect Boonserm Premthada has built a tunnel of vaulting parabolic arches from elephant poo briquettes.

6. Always cover your cicchetti with a paper napkin. The biggest seagulls you have ever seen will snatch that salt cod crostini right off your plate.

   

   “I think the pipes are dirty in here”

7. One of Ratti’s more successful commissions is a pop-up coffee bar serving €1.30 espressos made with water seemingly filtered from the Venetian lagoon. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro it would be more impressive if I hadn’t recently seen my friend’s narrowboat filtration system, which is 100 times smaller and capable of making Hackney canal water drinkable. But at least the coffee is cheapish.

8. Water taxis are the sexiest way to travel in the known universe. But only if someone else is paying. Don’t forget to post a selfie so your friends know you are a baller.

9. Big brand partnerships are in. Gherkin starchitect Norman Foster has buddied up with Porsche to make a glitzy water bike pontoon. Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas are ‘collaborating’ with Cartier and Prada. Despite architecture's falling salaries, a cartoon Rolex ticks on the official Biennale website.

10. It’s a very strong year for the Biennale’s 65 or so national pavilions which sit beyond the influence of Ratti’s curatorial chaos. The best is Poland’s delicious love letter to all the gubbins we use to feel safe in buildings, which asks if a CCTV camera is really any less woo than a lucky horseshoe. The Dutch are queering sports bars; the Austrians are showing off about Vienna’s awesome social housing (does your council estate come with rooftop swimming pools?); and the Slovenians have built monuments celebrating the skills of jobbing builders. The Uzbek’s is about their Heliocomplex, an epic 1981 solar furnace capable of heating matter to over 3,000 degrees. More importantly, their retroreflective grey tote bags are the must-have accessory in this year’s Biennale capsule wardrobe.

    

    If James Bond was captured in Samarkand, this is what they’d use to laser him

11. The Israel pavilion was closed for the duration of last year’s art Biennale. A note from the curators protesting the war in Gaza was stuck to its door pledging that the pavilion would only open when the bombing stopped. The building is still closed, but the protest note has been removed.
    

12. The true cuisine of Venice is not anchovy pasta or squid ink risotto: it is the late-night ham and cheese toastie. Bars which seem to serve nothing but Spritz will, if propositioned, produce the finest toastie you have ever eaten, with a dipping sauce to match.
    

13. The V&A are showing a film about storage, which is actually better than it sounds.
    

14. The neofash and tech bro alliance of Buttafuoco and Ratti may have delivered a dud, but nothing in the Venice Architecture Biennale is ever as good as the architecture of Venice itself. If you find yourself succumbing to Biennale fatigue from too much waffly AI-generated wall text and esoteric installations, just go look at a passing gondola.

Follow Phineas Harper on Twitter (still not calling it the stupid new name) here.

The Vernissage Virgin

Anyone who thinks they’re anyone in architecture was in town for the press days last week. I was there too – for the first time.

To say you do ‘vernissage’ for the architecture is like saying you go to Center Parcs at half-term to be in nature. If it were true, you’d come later, when you don’t have to queue for cicchetti, or during acqua alta, to really bring home the message of imminent climate disaster. No. It’s about the parties, the dinners you’re not invited to, the starchitects, the vicarious sex, tote bag signalling and not feeling left behind. Just admit you care about at least one of these. For me, it’s the bags.

For the architects, the biggest star is Norman Foster. The film stars arrive in August, when it’s hotter and hornier. May is more about insulation panels. I pass him sitting on a table in St Mark’s Square. Not at, on. He’s Lord Foster, he can sit where he likes. A half-man, half-linen Pritzker-winner passes me in the Giardini. I follow a Royal Gold Medallist on the Marco Polo travelator like a respectful intern, fresh from spying the RIBA President picking up a Kit-Kat at Gatwick.

Carlo Ratti’s title, ‘intelligens’ is memed to death. WiFi intelligens. Bollard intelligens. I find this kind of collective irony depressing. Everyone assumes it’s Italian too, but my Latin GCSE begs for its moment. Gens: populus. Intellegere: not intelligence, more understanding. Have I just spotted a critical nuance? I add it to my notes, which so far just say: ‘Poland YES’.

The exhibits are spread across two sites and around the city. The Giardini: architectural Eurovision, big national exhibition pavilions. Arsenale: IT dept throws a warehouse party, hairy igloos, immersive Jean Michel Jarre. It’s a lot. I try to care about robots.

When I’m invited to a fancy do, I expect my barriers to be psychological. I feel graceless, would Issey Miyake pleats help? Turns out, the barriers are physical – the door’s locked. I circuit the Arsenale in the rain with a couple of curators and glamorous Italians, until a tall Belgian knocks assertively on a window for us.

Inside, everyone’s already seated, quiet, chic. After a panel discussion about the making of a drink, I’m handed a world-first taste of the 40% proof spirit. Things quickly soften. There’s food! I pair an exquisite saffron risotto with the croutons I mistook for crisps in my bag. By the time I’m sent off in a complimentary water taxi, I like all the whisky people, very much. I’m invited to join the curators at the Cosmic House party, but go to bed. No Biennale sex for me, I’m married and my hotel room door opens into the breakfast lounge.

Regulars love to show off to a vernissage virgin like me – the good times were never this year, you had to be there in 20XX. I notice how they enjoy the feel of their bar’s name in their mouth, its taste of exclusivity. The real flex is a legendary publicist, who has a water taxi on constant standby.

I wonder what can possibly unite the interests of this international gathering; the technocratic and hempy, the commercially ‘pragmatic’ and earnestly purposeful. The answer: roadworks. Specifically, the repaving of St Mark’s Square which offers an exciting chance to peek under its chunky trachyte stones. This unselfconscious glee was present even as we landed, the architects craning their necks for an aerial glimpse of Venice’s flood defences. It’s like watching my son open a fresh Pokémon pack. Their little faces. These things I find endearing, and I think that’s the truth in the architecture Biennale: at heart, they’re all massive nerds.

Follow Sarah Simpkin on Twitter (see above) here.

It’s Basically Free

Well, it finally happened. The average price of a pint is cresting the £7 mark, which is clearly bad news. The good news is that a year’s print subscription to The Fence costs less than four pints. (Cheaper still – a penny under twenty quid – for the digital sub.)

Our advice is this: picture yourself at the bar. Imagine, right now, the purchase of eight whole pints: the cost, the grogginess, the indigestion. Then, restrain yourself – consider eight halves instead. In just one mental exercise, you’ve saved enough for a full year of access to the UK’s Only Magazine. Subscribe today, and to celebrate, peruse our picks for the best boozers in London.

O Captain, My Captain

Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the geology grad turned ‘interim’ president of Burkina Faso, has made waves on the real international stage (that is, TikTok) these last few months, for a series of searing anti-corruption, anti-colonial speeches. Hey, who doesn’t like those?

Inevitably, given that he leads a military junta government, it’s worth waiting it out a little before throwing arms around the Captain. Traoré – pivoting, perhaps understandably, from the patronage of France – has formed a fast friendship with the leader of the ‘multi-polar world’, Vladimir Putin, and as per the BBC, seems to be treading a recognisable path toward suppressing internal opponents.

And yet, the online love for Traoré is intensifying, getting weirder by the day. A cursory doomscroll reveals thousands of strange clips, like this viral address about threats from the West, AI-translated into conspicuously smooth English, or this pornified, pro-junta slop, paradoxically titled ‘Empowering Women in Leadership’.

If you want to go straight to the source, Burkinabé state television is actually live-streamed on YouTube – but it’s nowhere near as entertaining as the clips above.

Get That Paper

If you’ve torn through your new Issue 23 like a greedy child devouring Easter chocolate, we understand you; we can’t get enough of it either. Fortunately, we have the solution for your mucky hands – more chocolate! Back issues of The Fence are still available on our website for the same ludicrous price of £7.50.

Issue 21 features the definitive account of Evgeny Lebedev’s rise to prominence, paired with a stunning cover by Paul Cox. For fans of a real vintage, we have a scant few copies left of issues 14 through 17 – leaf through pages on fashion, classified intel or Roald Dahl’s wanking shed, depending on which one you buy. But these remaining copies are in very short supply, so act quickly.

And when you’ve picked out your selection of wonderful back issues, consider picking up a stunning tote bag, to carry them around with you wherever you go.

In Case You Missed It

Shaun Walker tells about a KGB spy codenamed ‘The Inheritor’, who tried to recruit his son.

A researcher has discovered that Reform voters are more likely to get dates than Tories.

Peter Dench knows how to take a great picture of the races.

Another New York Magazine masterpiece, unpicking the phenomenon of the West Village Girl.

And Finally

As the football season winds down – another miserable one for Manchester United fans, but who’s counting? – we thought it might be a good time to celebrate one of their most committed lunatics: the ever-strange ‘King Eric’ Cantona.

Best known for defending a righteous kung-fu kick to a racist fan’s face with a cryptic metaphor about sardine trawling, and retiring at the hilariously premature age of 30, United’s most enigmatic number 7 has continued to be a deep well of weirdness, long into his dotage.

He has taken enthusiastically to pet ownership, being recently spotted walking his pet goat through London. Like many of his former teammates, he has thrown himself just as keenly into content creation, albeit in his inimitably odd way, shooting POV footage of himself going down a slide, and recording his own music – something that he is, how do we put it politely, less suited to than the beautiful game. You can see him performing his song, the bluntly titled ‘I Love You So Much’, live in Manchester’s Stoller Hall, which includes the truly phenomenal verse: ‘Then the press called me the greatest philosopher/ and I think they were completely right.’

Of all this post-career madness, however, Cantona shines brightest in the video below: his acceptance speech after winning the 2019 UEFA President’s Award. The host made the unfortunate error of asking Cantona, ‘What’s going through your mind right now?’ His answer is brilliant; the reactions of the star-studded crowd, even better. If you’ve ever wanted to see Pavel Nedved looking totally befuddled, this is the clip for you.

*

That’s it! Done! No more! No more newsletter! For this week, anyway – plenty more to come next week, including the next edition of Capital Letter, our increasingly popular guide to London life. We’ll be back again this time next Tuesday, but for now, enjoy the sunshine, and buy a subscription.

All the best,

TF